AngryDill

I got a 404 response with the above link. I did find the Mastodon client code there at a slightly different path: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fastbasic/blob/master/samples/fp/mastodon.bas

Clearly retro developers never give up, never surrender! ?

When I worked on my game, I couldn't find anything out there that did this, so I created a little command-line utility in Python to render ATASCII as a png. If you're interested I put it up on my GitHub site here: https://gist.github.com/angrydill/bee002354bfffcdae36b2bb8d7e036fe

As someone who's not an Atari graphics guru (and always impressed by those of you who are), it's not obvious to me. My guesses would be... You're using the vertical blanking interval to adjust the fine scrolling register? You're using ultra-wide player graphics for the floors between levels, and missiles for the boxes? You're using custom character graphics for the brick, and are rotating different character sets to give illusion of movement? You're animating the color palate? Am I even close? At any rate, I must say that it looks really cool! +1 on that! ?

I wish I still had all my old floppies. I only managed to hang on to half a dozen or so. Most of the games and utilities can be found on sites, but the files I created myself (short stories, school reports, dumb little programs, etc.) those are lost forever. ? Oh, and I wish I still had my Koala Pad. I really loved that thing.

Ahh crabapples, I goofed up. Very sorry about that. I copied the new source code (WIZOWASD.BAS) into the ATR, but forgot to update the compiled version (WIZOWASD.COM), and that's what the batch file runs. I've attached the ATR with the fix. If you'd rather, you can fix the ATR you already have by compiling the .BAS within the ATR itself. Press Esc to quit the game, then Esc again to exit to DOS. Then run FBC (FastBasic compiler) and give it an input name of WIZOWASD.BAS and an OUTPUT of WIZOWASD.COM. When you reboot, it will run the updated compiled code... Sorry to all for the inconvenience. WIZOWASD.ATR

As mentioned earlier, I just loaded the updated version of WIzard of Wasd to the site here: http://angrydill.com/wasd Or you can grab the latest ATR attached to this post. Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! WIZOWASD.ATR

That little optimization really does make a difference, thanks! Coincidentally, that's actually the second time you've helped make my display routine faster. The first was by you creating the (awesome) FastBasic interpreter/compiler! ? I had originally coded the game in TurboBasic XL, and while it was fully functional, the screen refresh was really slow. I had read about FastBasic and decided to give it a try, and was very impressed with the results! In addition to better speed, it's nice to have true string arrays, and FB seems to support a lot more abbreviations, making it easier to fit programs in 10 lines. Also, thanks for the tip using ' for comments, I'm now a convert! In a couple of days I'll be publishing an updated version of Wizard of Wasd with the screen improvement, and with the (earlier requested) turning off of the keyclick sound. Thanks again, Randy "AngryDill" Gill

Awesome... Thanks for trying that out! Frankly, I'd forgotten that you can turn off the annoying key chirp with poke. Thanks for reminding me! In theory I should have enough characters, I may have to move some things around. I'll look and see what I can do. Thanks again!

Kevin Savetz has has created a lot of great Atari entries; his FloddyBot game is particularly impressive. I'd recommend looking at his GitHub account where he has them linked: https://github.com/savetz. He's been great about writing up explanations about how the code works, and I learned a lot from them. It helped quite a bit when I was getting started on my first (modern day) Atari program. That's a good segue for an announcement I'd like to make. There's a brand new Atari entry in the 10-liner contest! ? It's a graphical adventure game I've named... WIZARD OF WASD It's an EXTREM-256 entry in FastBasic. I've attached the self-running ATR, but full details (including commented source) are up on my personal site here: http://angrydill.com/wasd It should run on an original 800 (or later) with 48K+. I've tested it under emulation with a variety of hardware profiles. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out the best way to connect my 800 and 800XL to my Raspberry Pi to load stuff onto them, so it's not yet tested with physical hardware. If anyone out there has a SIO2PC or something like that, and would like to let me know if it works on their machine, I'd be most grateful! I hope you enjoy the game, and maybe find the source code interesting or informative. Thanks, Randy "AngryDill" Gill Long-time lurker, first time poster WIZOWASD.ATR